Riot

'RIOT': Three Stars (Out of Five)

Action flick starring Matthew Reese, Dolph Lundgren, Danielle Chuchran and former UFC champion Chuck Liddell. It was directed by John Lyde; and written by Lyde and first time feature film writer Spanky Dustin Ward. The film tells the story of a police officer, that purposefully gets himself arrested; in order to take down the imprisoned Russian kingpin that murdered his family. The movie's clichéd, but it has it's moments.

Jack Stone (Reese) is a cop, who's obsessed with revenge against a Russian kingpin, named Balam (Liddell); who had his family killed. Balam runs his business from behind bars; in a heavily guarded prison cell. So stone stages a bank robbery, just to have himself arrested. Once he's locked-up, he finds aid from two undercover cops inside (Lundgren and Chuchran).

The movie offers nothing new in the form of originality, or clever filmmaking. The stars are entertaining to watch though, and the fight scenes are decent enough. It's not a film you'll probably remember for very long, after you finish watching it, but it is a fun time while you're viewing it. It's at least as entertaining as I was expecting it to be.

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The last few Dolph Lundgren flicks have been rough going (specifically the Serafini ones like BLOOD OF REDEMPTION), so I entered RIOT with expectations lower than usual. So it was nice to see it actually putting forth some effort. It is essentially a vanity project (lead Matthew Reese's name appears 3 times in the first 30 seconds) and you have to suffer through UFC fighter Chuck Liddell - sporting a huge HGH belly - doing one of the worst Russian accents in the history of cinema (not an easy feat!), but the filmmakers came up with a twisty plot, some cool guard costumes and did some interesting fight choreography (which was obviously influenced by JOHN WICK and THE RAID films). Not a Dolph- classic by any means, but a decent 85 minutes.

Best part of this movie was Chuck trying to do a Russian accent...the longer he has to talk the more it goes leans towards Colombian, very funny.

You could honestly miss large chunks of the movie and still know what is going on.

Not good, but not bad either.

I find that if you want to be an action star, all you have to do is produce the movie that you star in and pay to have some lower level, but fairly well-known, washed up celebrities to appear in your movie.I have no idea who plays the main character, but I wanted to watch because of Ivan Drago, I mean Dolph.

Overall, it was okay. The action was fine, the story was fine, but this would have been 1 or 2 stars higher if I didn't have to listen to Chuck Lidell's incredibly horrible take on a Russian accent. Seriously, he sounded like a Mexican born in South America but raised in Uzbekistan. Seriously, every time he talked I wanted to just fast forward through that part of the movie.

I guess if you can stand listening to the Iceman butcher the accent, you might enjoy this movie quite a bit.

A pretty bad movie that I decided to watch because I enjoyed Dolph Lundgren in 'ONE IN THE CHAMBER (2012)' and I also enjoy prison movies so despite the low rating I thought to myself: why not?

But despite the fact that Dolph Lundgren's face covers about 80% of the poster for the first half of the movie he is so far from being the lead, heck for the first 27 minutes he doesn't even have any lines and is limited to just sweeping the floors (literally with a broom).

I expected him the Russian kingpin, but nope he plays a mysterious quiet inmate with janitorial duties.

The kingpin is played by Chuck Lidell who for the record is on the poster, and I guess that's okay cause he is the actual bad guy of the movie but the main 'hero' of the movie is not even on it, played by Matthew Reese.

So yeah anyways even if you look aside all that it's a pretty boring movie, we've seen it all before but usually a lot more exciting.

They manage to throw in a even more so boring sub-plot about a news reporter on the outside as well and one about a female prisoner in the female department of the prison which feels like it was added just because it wouldn't be a long enough movie focusing on just Reese, Lidell and (ocassionally) Lundgren in all honesty.

All in all wooden acting by pretty much everyone doesn't help... Makes 'VENDETTA (2015)' with Dean Cain and The Big Show look like a prison- movie classic in comparison.